Australia was not just the movie that Nicole Kidman always dreamed of making as a little girl. The Baz Luhrmann epic adventure film due to be released in November will now also be remembered by the famous redhead as the movie that gave her something else much more unexpected and precious – her new baby daughter. Sunday Rose.
“I never thought in my lifetime that I would get pregnant and give birth to a child but it happened on this movie,” an emotional Nicole says at one point. The 41-year-old actress is talking to us exclusively from London, where she is in rehearsals to sing and dance her way through a supporting role in the highly anticipated musical film Nine, inspired by the Fellini movie 8 ½ and starring Daniel Day Lewis as a hen-pecked director whose life is run by women. During our chat and previous interviews on the set of Australia in both Kununurra and Sydney, Nicole touches on everything from her great Australian movie role opposite Hugh Jackman and the challenges that came with this labor of love, to the occasional revelation about her other new role as Sunday’s mum. The fiercely protective and surprisingly shy actress struggles with how to keep her personal life private with a nation of eyes – not to mention paparazzi - on her newborn, but at the same time can’t help but let us in on how she’s feeling at this blessed time in her life.
“It’s exhausting,” she acknowledges, “but I think probably at this age it’s more like” - and she lets out a huge, satisfied sigh - “spell-binding for me. To be given this again is a very beautiful thing. To have raised Bella and Connor since I was 25 and now to be able to do it again at 41, wow! But I’m ready and I love children and love the connection and to be needed. Who doesn’t want to be needed?” she muses. “And that’s probably the thing for my character Lady Sarah Ashley in the film, because she also finds there is a place in the world where she is really needed by these two males.”
The two males Nicole is referring to are her ruggedly handsome Aussie co-star Hugh Jackman, who plays the Drover that sweeps her character off her feet, and eleven-year-old Aboriginal actor Brandon Walters, who plays her surrogate son Nullah and became like a son to her during filming.
Set in northern Australia just before World War II, Australia follows the journey of Lady Sarah Ashley, an English aristocrat (Kidman) who inherits a sprawling ranch in the outback and reluctantly makes a pact with a cattle drover (Jackman) to protect her new property from a takeover plot by cattle baron King Carney (Bryan Brown). The pair band together with an unlikely group including her alcoholic accountant (Jack Thompson) and young Nullah to drive 2,000 head of cattle over unforgiving landscape to Darwin, where they experience firsthand the bombing of that city by Japanese forces.
“As a kid I grew up watching Australian films that were accepted around the world like Gallipoli, Man from Snowy River and My Brilliant Career and all those films and actors molded and inspired me,” Nicole reflects. “I really wanted to make a film like that as a kid so when we were filming this one, I’d look at Baz and Hugh sometimes and go, ‘look, we’re doing it!’ Hopefully the generation behind me will watch our movie and feel the same way too because, while it also works on a global level, it is very much a celebration of our country and our landscape and the pain and love and survivor aspect of what we are as Australians.”
Nicole has certainly had more than her fair share of pain, love and survival and much of it, she’s experienced in the glare of the public eye as the world watched the rollercoaster of her life unfold with its ups and downs: her marriage to superstar Tom Cruise in 1990, the adoption of their two children Bella, 15 and Conor, 13, her split with Cruise in 2001, her Oscar for The Hours and her love story with singer Keith Urban, their fairytale Sydney wedding in 2006 and the arrival of Sunday Rose on July 7.
So it’s no surprise Nicole relates so closely to her character in Australia, an English aristocrat who goes through some tough times and finds out what she’s really made of. “She’s a woman who has been protected with so many barriers she has no idea who she is and she comes to this country and sheds a lot of the walls she’s built up to protect herself and finds out what her intrinsic qualities are and what she’s made of,” Nicole explains. “I love being able to discover the truth so I relate to her because there are ways in which we all build up our own shields. It’s actually about finding your own fortitude and that’s a beautiful story I could relate to a lot.”
After Moulin Rouge, Nicole found fortitude in her work and the result was an Academy award for Best Actress as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. Ironically life and art have a strange way of finding each other in her world. “When I worked on The Hours I had the weirdest time because I was going through the worst place in my whole life so I understood everything Virginia was going through and it was very cathartic in the same way this film was cathartic for me too,” she says.
In what way? “Opening me up again,” Nicole admits. “Suddenly I have this man that I love in my life and suddenly I’m given a child and it’s the same way in the film with the things Lady Ashley gets given – a man and a small child. Both Bella and Connor are teenagers and embarking on a whole different stage, so to have an infant again is astounding!”
As part of the sweeping back-story of Australia, the characters are present during the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese, an event that Nicole sheepishly admits she wasn’t even aware had taken place before Baz told her the idea for the film.
“I must have been asleep in history class,” she grins, “but I’ve educated myself a lot since I first heard about the film. Even my father, who is incredibly bright, came on set and saw some footage and questioned whether the Japanese actually came onto Australian soil and I said, ‘it’s true dad, Baz told me!’”
Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman became a screen couple after Russell Crowe was forced to bow out of the film due to a scheduling conflict. The movie’s success depends on the chemistry between the pair and maybe that is why Nicole seems reluctant to say too much about the fact Hugh happens to be married to one of her best friends, actress Deborra-Lee Furness. “Because Deb is an actress and Keith is an artist, there is just a tacit agreement amongst all of us that you do the work, you go and create something artistically in another space and that’s what we do,” she says dismissively of the suggestion it must feel strange to get paid to kiss her friend’s husband!
The affable Hugh doesn’t want to kiss and tell either, but he says thanks to the collaboration with the trio, audiences will witness a great movie romance. “The thing that is unique about Baz is that usually when you’re in theatre or in film you feel moments of magic occasionally,” Hugh says. “But with Baz, I don’t think there is a day we’ve shot where there hasn’t been a moment of magic and it’s the thing we all live for, the hairs on the back of your neck standing up, so the result is something beautiful.”
Nicole knew Hugh as a friend and was a fan of his work, so she had no regrets she wasn’t able to play the role opposite her other good friend Russell Crowe. “I would hope I get to work with Russell one day but I was thrilled to be able to work with Hugh and I got to know him on this film in a far different way and he’s such a movie star and so fantastic to work with,” she says. “There is a lot of mystery to Hugh, which is good. People say there is mystery to me and I’m pleased about that because I don’t think you should have to reveal every part of you, and artistically I think it helps because then you can abandon yourself into some parallel universe where you both exist as actors and artists and hope out of that something good comes out.”
Nicole was equally enamored with her younger male co-star, Brandon Walters. “He is just a magical child and we were very lucky to find him because he’s not an actor so capturing him on screen, you had to grab the moments and what I call the glimpses of the soul,” she says. Perhaps her motherly role with Brandon got her slightly clucky? “Yeah, clucky, and at the same time I was so engrossed in the role and finding that I play a woman who can’t have children so he becomes my child and I fall absolutely into this well of love through these two male figures, one a male child and one a grown man.”
Although Nicole’s pregnancy was not confirmed until January, it doesn’t take much of a mathematician to figure out she’d conceived while filming. “I knew it was going to be a physically and emotionally demanding shoot because when I embark on a film with Baz I know it’s going to be extreme and I’m prepared,” she says. “But nothing happened in a small way on this film because we had heat and torrential rains and equine flu and then I got pregnant!
“Seven babies were conceived out of this film, and only one was a boy,” she adds with amusement. “There is something up there in the Kununurra water, because we all went swimming in the waterfalls up there so we call it the fertility waters now!”
The future for Australia’s favorite redhead is undecided. The Urbans split their time between their Sydney home and their Nashville property, which is a sprawling estate that gives them more privacy. They recently bought a house in Beverly Hills “so we could be close to Bella and Connor and go there with Sunday so they can spend time together,” Nicole explains.
Asked if Sunday will grow up in Australia, Nicole admits her dilemma. “I am intrinsically Australian and I want her to have that because she deserves that, but she doesn’t deserve to be scared by paparazzi or followed to her school,” she says. “Hopefully if the paparazzi lay off on us in Australia we can spend a lot of time there but right now they make it impossible because it’s dangerous.”
Sunday was born in Nashville, with Nicole’s mother Janelle, sister Antonia and Keith in the delivery room, but seemingly overnight the statuesque star seems to have shed all the baby weight and a month later she was back in Sydney in costume doing final pick-up shots on Australia. “I’m lucky I’m so tall so I carried small and also I have to say I had a birth that I was blessed with, a labor that was very good and a baby that was very good to me in that regard,” Nicole admits. “They say that’s (an easy labor) genetic so I’m grateful for that, because it was beautiful and Keith was my rock through it all.”
On the eve of the long anticipated release of Australia, Nicole nervously hopes they won’t let down the country she still calls home. “We’ve all been inspired by wonderful film makers like Peter Weir, Phil Noyce, George Miller, Gillian Armstrong and Bruce Beresford. Hopefully we will now represent the Aussie film industry and be able to give back to a country and to an industry that has given us so much.
“We didn’t want to let people down, so it won’t be for lack of trying,” she adds. “We have invested our hearts in this movie and hopefully that will be represented.”
